ORNING ROLL CALL.
The most depressing
of camp routines.
Faces are tense, suspicious. No
one knows who has been turned
into an informer by the KGB.
For Vadim Arenberg (above,
left foreground), imprisoned in
1979 for planning to escape from
the Soviet Union by hijacking
an airliner, the dream of free
dom came true on September
27, 1989. Carrying a sailor's bag
and two big wooden suitcases,
he embraced his family (right),
unable to believe he was finally
on the right side of the electric
gates and steel doors.
Could this small dark bundle
of woman (above right) really
be Ina? Ina, the young, gray
eyed Jewish girl with whom he
exchanged letters for years
before finally being allowed to
marry her? Ina who gave him a
daughter, Jeanne, whom he has
seen only once in her three years?
He made a puppet for his
daughter, he tells Ina, but the
camp guards smashed it to
pieces. It could have contained
a secret message, they said.
Now that he is a free man,
Vadim has decided not to leave
the Soviet Union after all but to
settle his family in Kharkov and
open a Hebrew school. He prays
that the years of repression are
gone. But forget the friends who
have stayed behind? Never.
National Geographic, March 1990